TALPA LOQUITUR. 151 



tyrdom, and that to be stoned by his own generation, 

 and worshiped by the next, is at once the penalty of 

 human pioneership, and the reiterated monument of 

 human folly, dotting the road, like milestones. 



It is very fine, no doubt, to connect one's own 

 small-scale improvements, after this fashion, with the 

 history of the Great and Dead, to whom life was one 

 conflict with ridicule and contempt a history the 

 most aflectingly interesting perhaps the most im- 

 portant that is left to us ; but after all, the grandeur 

 or pettiness of the scale does not alter the argument. 

 And when I had listened for half an hour to Mr. 

 Greening discoursing of Guano and Superphosphate, 

 in as easy and as matter-of-fact a style as if he had 

 regularly carted them out of his farm-yard on to the 

 turnips any time this fifty years, (though he still 

 called it Gu-anner, and would not have it at any price 

 as a word of two syllables,) I could not help mentally 

 amusing myself with thinking of the time when he used 

 to poke every imaginable jocularity at me for ' sowing 

 the sawdust' ' wheel-barrow farming,' ' pocket-dung- 

 carts/ and a whole heap of good sayings which, 

 duly noted down on my part, made my chronicle of 

 that date a complete glossary of farm-witticisms : and 

 curious it was to see how the memory of former in- 



